Rethinking ‘Strengths’ in Youth Health Research

The language of 'strengths' and 'strengths-based approaches' has rapidly grown in health research, yet rarely have these approaches been evaluated for their conceptual adequacy. This paper presents an analysis of recent literature to examine how young people's 'strengths' have been represented. We found that most papers use the language of resilience and protective factors to focus mostly on individual traits or attributes. This literature offers limited, if any, understanding of how 'strengths' are produced, being concerned instead with describing and classifying individual traits. A smaller group of studies has used concepts of capital to frame strengths in relation to the durability and quality of relationships. Our analysis suggests that this relational understanding of 'strengths' opens up more productive conceptual space for policies and programmes to intervene not with individuals but with social relations: the practices, identities and collective knowledges that produce and sustain young people's positive trajectories.